Jessica Huseman NYT oped:

The Republican Party appears poised to stand by and say nothing while its most die-hard supporters risk disenfranchising themselves and others.

There’s a right-wing movement afoot pressuring local governments to manually tally votes on ballots without any of the machines that make this work quick and precise. One particularly determined man is even traveling from red county to red county in a branded R.V., preaching the good word to county councils and election boards.

Counting ballots by hand is still very rare in the United States. And studies and myriad real-world examples have repeatedly shown that counting by hand is a uniquely bad idea in the context of American democracy. In the United States, ballots often have several dozen choices on them for federal, state and local elections — not just a couple of options. And humans are notoriously poor at tedious, repetitive tasks.

Imagine, if you will, a truck full of paper currency. You and a few lucky friends have to count the money, which has come in a variety of denominations, by hand. You have to finish in a matter of days, and you also have to keep the bills in order under penalty of law. You can’t use a counting machine, and you can’t even use a program like Excel to do the summations. How many friends do you think you would need? Do you think you would all arrive at the same totals?

Votes, like dollar bills, would very likely be lost or miscounted. But, here, your vote is not insured and will not be returned by your bank. Such a change has the potential to harm those counties’ ability to effectively and reliably tally votes for years after the fact: Counting votes involves budgets, contracts and more.